Iceland Rejects Restarting EU Accession Talks in Referendum

Iceland has voted against restarting accession talks with the European Union in a referendum held this weekend.

A tally of votes on Sunday morning, reported by Iceland’s national broadcaster, RÚV, showed that Icelanders rejected the government’s bid to resume negotiations with the bloc, with 52.5 percent voting against and 47.5 percent in favor. Votes from one last electoral constituency in the country are still being counted.

The count shows the “yes” vote performing strongly in the capital Reykjavík, where a third of the country lives, while “no” outperformed in rural areas, where it reached upwards of 60 percent.

Polling in the run-up to the vote showed the North Atlantic nation almost evenly split. The government, led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, promised to hold a referendum after coming into power at the end of 2024.

Iceland first started talks to join the EU in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis that devastated its financial sector. These were largely inconclusive before being definitively called off in 2015, with arguments over fishing quotas contributing to the collapse of the negotiations.

This time around, the euro proved to be a key issue, with proponents of restarting talks arguing that joining the single currency could go some way to fixing Iceland’s high-inflation problem. Detractors, such as Guðrún Hafsteinsdóttir, the leader of the conservative Independence Party, said that the country was better off charting its own course while remaining a member of the European Economic Area.

In an interview in the run-up to the vote, Frostadóttir said that it was a “very exciting” moment for the country, and that the government had fulfilled its promise to let people “express their opinions and what they thought about this journey.”